Page 49 - Federal Computer Week, May/June 2019

been written down on paper.
I spent considerable time promot- ing this approach when I was work- ing in government, and many assumed the idea came from the White House. In fact, the initiative originated with career contracting professionals, in particular Mike Del Colle, the progres- sive head of contracting at the Interior Department’s Minerals Management
Service.
The role of hands-on
demonstrations
More recently, there has been a surge in what are often called tech demos. They represent a radical reimagining of source selection in the direction of “show me, don’t tell me.” The basic idea is that those wishing to bid on work send company representatives to a government location for a fixed amount of time — ranging from a half- day to several days — to work together on developing a solution to an IT soft- ware problem, which might or might not be the same problem the govern- ment is seeking to solve with the pro- curement. At the end of the period, participating firms submit what they
have developed, and those solutions are evaluated as part or most of source selection.
Some of the early uses of tech demos have been at the Department of Homeland Security, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the General Services Administration.
Tech demos have numerous attrac- tive features. The most obvious is that the information the government gleans from a demo can be much more use- ful than the information contained in a proposal.
In addition, a tech demo dramatical- ly streamlines source selection, saving time on the development and evalua- tion of proposals. To participate in a tech demo, one needn’t be an expert on government contracting but simply an expert on software development. For that reason, demos have been espe- cially attractive to new, nontraditional contractors that don’t know the ins and outs of the federal system very well.
Note that the main function of ear- lier efforts to reduce the reliance on written proposals helped the govern- ment gather better information but did
not streamline the process or encour- age the entry of new vendors.
In response to growing government interest in “show me, don’t tell me,” even some traditional contractors are developing a capability to deliver demos. A recent piece in the Federal Times discussed how SAIC, a big IT and security contractor, had “changed to meet new IT contract styles.” SAIC CTO Charles Onstott was quoted as saying, “We’re increasingly seeing requests for proposals [that ask for] instead of a written response, show up with a team and deploy a prod- uct by the end of the day.” In Octo- ber 2018, SAIC set up an Innovation Factory, described as “a component of the company that relies on inno- vative and fast-working teams of IT professionals.”
I sent the article to my friend Stan Soloway, a former DOD acquisition executive who is now CEO of Celero Strategies, and in response, he wrote that many contractors “have invest- ed significantly in innovation, like Deloitte, CGI and Accenture, to name just a few.” His examples are interest- ing: Deloitte and Accenture also have a
May/June 2019 FCW.COM 49